


Untitled (Anna/Charlie)

by amorremanet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Cousin Incest, Episode: s07e20 The Girl with the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo, F/F, Femslash February, Ficlet, Ficlet Collection, Implied Incest, Vessel Fic, Vessels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 05:26:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>At least, she doesn’t notice anything until someone leans into her shoulder, the one whose arm is in a sling. She starts trying to tell them to back off and respect her personal space, especially given the broken arm, and then she looks down at a wide-eyed face she hasn’t seen in five years…</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Charlie’s bus is somewhere in Indiana when, out of nowhere, there’s a flutter of wings and a flash of red. Romeo Void’s playing on her ipod—it’s her playlist of eighties one-hit wonders—and she hums along without noticing a thing.  
  
At least, she doesn’t notice anything until someone leans into her shoulder, the one whose arm is in a sling. She starts trying to tell them to back off and respect her personal space, especially given the broken arm, and then she looks down at a wide-eyed face she hasn’t seen in five years, hasn’t seen since she was still going by Vera Milton.  
  
“Anna?” she whispers, name tripping off her tongue as though nothing ever happened between them—as though she never had to help restrain her baby cousin in the middle of her campus’s quad; as though she never had to see Anna in a locked psych ward, zoned out and going on about some Apocalypse that, as it turns out with the whole mess of stuff involving Leviathans, might’ve been more real than Charlie ever wanted to believe; as though she never had to lie awake at night and wonder if what happened between them, in any part, was part of what drove Anna crazy.  
  
Anna lifts her head and smiles up at Charlie, shrugs and nudges their shoulders together. “Yes and no,” she says, voice so quiet that Charlie has a hard time hearing it. “My real name is Anael—but you knew me as Anna Grace Milton, your cousin. I’m an angel and we need to talk about something very important.”  
  
“Right,” Charlie says. Nods slowly. Tries not to consider the possibility that she’s fallen asleep and started dreaming all this up—not least because falling asleep on this sketchy bus sounds like a really bad idea. “Of course you are. I mean, Leviathans, I guess, are real, so why wouldn’t there be angels running around, too. Makes sense. Sure. I don’t suppose you could just tell me what you want to talk about without all the supernatural ego defense mechanisms or whatever’s going on, right?”  
  
Anna wrinkles her nose, furrows her brow ever so slightly. “There aren’t any ego defense mechanisms going on here, Vera—or should I say Charlie?” She waits for confirmation that no, really, “Charlie” is better than, “Vera,” then shakes her head. “I really am an angel—and I need your help.”  
  
“Of course you do. I mean, why wouldn’t you, right?”  
  
First, those two underwear model brothers needed help with Leviathans. Now, Anna’s suddenly alive again, says she’s an angel, and needs Charlie’s help with some big time angel problems. The fact that this is Charlie’s life now is just frakking staggering. Since when did she walk into a damn Carver Edlund novel, and where the Hell can she sign up to transfer to something a little more her speed? Maybe some  _Doctor Sexy, MD_  spin-off about a hot ladies who work in IT and have romantic shenanigans with each other?  
  
“This body wasn’t built to survive everything it’s been through,” Anna says with a sigh. “Especially not things that should have killed me… I need a vessel that can contain me and my Grace.” She stares at Charlie as though she can read her soul. “I need you to say, ‘yes,’ Charlie. I need you to be my vessel.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts used in this ficlet are: "heaven & hell" (from [here](http://talbots.tumblr.com/post/41848811048/femslash-february-prompts-just-a-post-filled-with)), and "promise" (from 100 things).

When Charlie gets off her bus in Michigan, Anna helps her with her bags, helps her get the shoulder strap done up and drags the oversized suitcase behind her instead of making Charlie get it herself. They don't really talk as they wander up the streets, away from the bus depot, partly because the background noise is mother-flipping loud, and partly—well, mostly—because Charlie has no idea what to say.

What the Hell _can_ she say? What can she say to any of this? Her baby cousin is some kind of angel now—not to mention _alive_ from out of nowhere, after she disappeared, and Aunt Amy and Uncle Rich got killed, and pretty much everyone was sure there was no way Anna hadn't died—and more than that, she needs Charlie to be something called a vessel… None of it makes any kind of sense. None of it could even LARP at making sense, not if it wanted to.

She finds the words once they're sitting down in a diner with two oversized glasses of Coke, waiting on their soup and sandwich combos, and for all the stomach-twisting, bone-scraping anxiety leading up to them, the words are really pretty simple: "So… what the frak is going on here? Like, seriously. I think I'm pretty clear on the whole, 'angels and demons are for real' thing, but… how are you Anael _and_ Anna Milton? Like, human and angel, you can't be both, can you? And does that mean you weren't ever really my cousin? What. The frak. Is going on?"

"It's…" Anna starts, but has to stop before she can really get going. She takes a deep breath and heaves a sigh, spins the straw around her glass, clicking all the ice cubes up against the plastic. "I hate to say this—really, I do. It's nothing but a cop-out—but the situation really is… It's complicated. I'm the only case of anything like this ever happening, and I can't honestly say that there will ever be another case like me. I have a brother who could've gone down a similar path, but Castiel's case is even more complicated than mine by now."

"Wait, _Castiel_? Oh my god, I really did wake up in a Carver Edlund novel…" Not that Charlie should know this. The fandom wasn't ever supposed to get their hands on the ebooks that came after _No Rest For The Wicked_ , but they've been circulating since 2010—the stories about Sam and Dean (who Charlie guesses she's met in the flesh now, at that), and their other adventures.

She rubs hard at her temples, then takes a long sip of her drink. None of it settles her nerves any, but having something to fidget with feels nice—keeps her hands busy, at the very least. Not to mention keeping her from knocking her ankle into Anna's, the way they used to, the way Charlie wants to do right now.

Even with all this angel talk—even with how much it's straight out of those trashy novels and even with how it casts an unnatural pallor over Anna's face, making her look like she's only halfway in reality at all—Charlie can't help looking at the woman sitting opposite her and seeing her baby cousin with her enormous hazel eyes.

She sees the girl whose hair she used to braid, the girl she once took shopping for combat boots to complement her pretty pink prom dress, the girl who kissed her at midnight on New Year's Eve when they'd both had maybe a bit too much of Mom's champagne. The girl whose disappearance shook Charlie's world to the core and first made Charlie take on an alias and go underground.

The girl who, angel or human or whatever hybrid she might be, is blinking at Charlie like an owl and tilting her head to the side as though Charlie might make more sense if Anna does this. Charlie licks her lips and rubs them together, and guesses she should probably try giving Anna some hook back into this conversation, instead of just derailing it all over the place. Charlie's not going to get any answers if she keeps screwing around like this.

"I don't suppose my hijinks with breaking into Dick Roman's office are gonna end up all over the Internet or something—are they?" she says. Tries to laugh and doesn't do very well at making it sound anything but forced.

Anna shrugs. "I haven't heard anything about the Winchester prophecies lately—but I'm not actually… There are a few years missing from my knowledge. The last I was on Earth was 2010, then 1978… Time travel complicates things that much more, even more than the Apocalypse failing to happen, but… If Chuck Shurley isn't still writing the Winchester prophecies, then the task should've passed on to a Becky Rosen—but that's really beside the point, isn't it?"

She smiles, just barely. Just a little, unreadable quirk of her lips, accompanied by her bare toes nudging into Charlie's foot. "The point is that you want to understand."

"Yeah, that's pretty much spot-on, I mean… If I'm going to agree to this whole vessel business, then understanding all of what's going on here is probably a pretty good start?"

"The short version glosses over a few of the finer details, but it should get us on the same page, at least?" She waits for Charlie to tell her that the short version's fine, then goes on, "Well. Once upon a time, I was an angel, and a pretty powerful one, at that. I mean, I was the Commander of a sizable garrison—Castiel, from the books? He was a Captain underneath me—and with our brothers and sisters, we were assigned to watch over humanity. And yes, everything that happened in the books… It was real."

If memory serves, that means that the time travel Anna's refering to involved going back in time to erase the Winchesters from existence—but after meeting them, Charlie can't say that proposition doesn't have its appealing aspects. And Anna seems much clamer now. Probably the side-effect of surviving whatever murder-flavored thing the archangel Michael tried to do to her. Then again, maybe Charlie shouldn't contemplate about these sorts of things when she has no way of making fair calls about them. Maybe she should stick to sipping her Coke and furrowing her brow.

"Is that, like, bigger picture watching over—like, influencing the little things nobody even notices so they all add up to something big? Turning the screw and all that? Or is this, like, watching people in the shower watching over humanity?" Charlie supposes it's probably the latter, but it never hurts to ask—even if it makes Anna roll her eyes in a way that Charlie just hopes is more affectionate than not. That makes her look a little bit more real, a little bit more like herself and a little bit less like some hotshot angelic Commander.

"It's mostly bigger picture watching over, but that doesn't matter nearly as much as what I did with being an angel," she says, and she rubs her toes against Charlie's sneaker, edges up into Charlie's ankle. "I didn't want to be one anymore—I wanted to be human, to get to have free will, to be able to express emotions… So, I Fell. Tore out my Grace—that's like an angel's battery-pack, I guess you could say—and I got reborn as your cousin, Anna Milton. In 2008, I got my memories back, reawakened them, anyway? Made them conscious again? Then I got my Grace back, too…"

"So then, you really were my cousin, right? Everything that happened—everything we did, it was still—I… wow. My cousin was an angel the whole time?" This could practically be a Dear Penthouse Forum letter, if not for the cousins part—but, then again, maybe that wouldn't make too much of a difference. "Were you an angel the whole time or what?"

"You pose an interesting philosophical question," Anna says with a sigh. "Is an angel always an angel if they don't know they're an angel, or something like that? But, no. I was born as a human, and I wasn't really an angel again until my soul and my Grace got back together. Angels are a union of the two things—I have all of my human memories, if that's part of what you're curious about…"

"So that means that… I don't even know what that might mean. But if I say, 'yes' to you? What's that going to be like?" Charlie wraps her hands around her glass and tries to keep them still. She ends up running her thumb up and down the side anyway, but at least she's not fidgeting too terribly much. "It's probably going to hurt, right? I mean, Castiel's vessel in the books said it was like being chained to a comet or something."

"It won't be entirely pleasant for you, no." Anna shakes her head, presses her lips into a thin line. "Human souls… Grace can overwhelm them very easily—but it won't be entirely terrible, either. I haven't actually taken a vessel since that incident with Judith and Holofernes, but there's a negotiation process to it. I won't need to control your body the whole time I'm in it. There will be plenty of periods when I can just hide in your unconscious and let you go on as though nothing's any different—or we can share control, with one of us being more dominant than the other…"

She huffs a little and twirls a split end around one of her fingers. "There are a lot of ways that we can do things. And saying, 'yes' doesn't mean you consent to everything that might come up as a result of housing me, ever. Think of it as an ongoing dialogue."

"And if I don't do this—if I don't say yes and let you be my feathery parasite until question mark, undefined time period, then…" Charlie scrapes her teeth along her lower lip. "If I don't do this, then you're going to die, right? Anael and Anna Milton are both going to die… Because you're both of them, or a synthesis of both of them, or something that I'm sure involves all kinds of quantum mechanics, but the point is: you're going to die if I don't say yes?"

Anna sighs and nods. "I don't… I wish it were different, Charlie. I really do. I like this body, I'm used to it and I'm used to using it… But Michael really did a number on me—it's a miracle I even made it to you in the first place—I probably don't have that much longer… Enough time for lunch, sure, but past that, I'm just not certain."

Charlie's hands tremble from how hard she holds on to the glass. She takes a deep breath, then another, and a third, but she can't stop her heart from racing. Well, fluttering at a rapid pace, but that's just semantics. She looks down at the table, then back up to Anna, and she says, "Yes. I mean. That's all you need from me, right? Yes, I consent. I… You're not gonna care that I'm not vegan anymore, right? Because I kind of stopped that when I started being Charlie."

Anna smiles, more properly this time, and gives Charlie a fond chuckle. "After lunch, I'll take you up on that, then. And I'll do my best to make the initial joining as painless as possible."


End file.
